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LONDON—Canada’s women’s soccer team relied on more than fast footwork in their drive to the quarter-finals. They trained for the Olympics using gyroscopes, accelerometers, satellite tracking and a host of technology more commonly associated with Formula One than soccer.

They might be Canada’s most wired team, but their opponents on Friday, Team GB, has prepared using the same technology.

One of the invisible milestones at the 2012 Olympics is the extent to which data and sensors are transforming sports as more teams than ever are using technology to prepare their athletes.

The soccer squad’s athlete tracking technology is “one of the things that have allowed us to reach this level,” said Kelly McKean, senior performance analyst for Canada’s Own the Podium program. “Especially when other nations are using it and they are getting an edge from it, then we have to as well.”

The U.S. squad — the reigning Olympic women’s soccer champions — also train with sensors.

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“The teams that are using the newest technology are going to be the ones that go the furthest,” McKean said.

Canada’s women’s squad began using sensor devices in February. The devices, which are about half the size of an iPhone but thicker, fit between their shoulder blades in a pocket in a specially designed sports bra, McKean said.

Speed, balance, location, heart rate are just a few of the readings taken by the sensors and fed back to coaches and analysts on the sidelines. This data is combined and correlated to determine how much energy the athletes and expended and how quickly they are recovering from sprints.

Squad members run an average of 10 to 12 kilometres a game and the sensors give a bird’s-eye view of every step. In the run-up to the Games, the data was used to hone formations, ensure players’ fitness matched top international teams and make training programs more efficient and effective.

Teams are not allowed to use the devices during actual Olympic tournament games, but athletes wear them during practice. They also generated large amounts of data about their personal thresholds in other tournaments and friendly international games in the lead-up to London.

Own the Podium provided the sensors, which are also used by English Premier League soccer teams as well as NFL and NBA teams, to the women’s squad because they are believed to have one of the best shots at a medal. The team’s tech-savvy coaching crew embraced the technology, said McKean, who recalls watching a computer on the sidelines when the team first adopted the sensors.

“You’re looking at the screen and looking at players and going back and forth,” she said. “So you’re really getting an eye for what’s going on measurement-wise while you’re watching the field. It’s very revealing.”

Canada is also using the sensors to monitor individuals in paddling events and to train a number of Winter Olympic athletes, McKean said.

GPS technology was used by athletes in Beijing, but London is the first Games to see devices combine GPS with other sensors, said Michael Regan, a sports scientist for Catapult Sports, the Australian company that developed the technology.

There are hundreds of the devices being used in London to prepare athletes from the U.S., France, Australia and the Netherlands in events ranging from diving to rowing to basketball.

“It’s really evolved,” Regan said. “Some of our more innovative users are now using it in ways we hadn’t even imagined when we first conceptualized it.”

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